


Halfpence & Farthings

by mindyourfingers



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: AU, Gen, Kiddo!Losers, Neutral!Pennywise, Pennywise only has allusions or brief appearances, canon has been smoked out and left to die basically, child endangerment, family dysfunction, specific triggers tagged by chapter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-12
Updated: 2018-10-12
Packaged: 2019-07-29 19:00:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16270379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindyourfingers/pseuds/mindyourfingers
Summary: The clown flickered briefly through the Losers' lives, even before the fall of 1988. AU.





	Halfpence & Farthings

**Author's Note:**

> Beyond wanting more interactions between Pennywise and little-kiddy Losers, I don't have much of an explanation for this. I'm gonna leave it to you guys to decide what's up. If you're familiar with the Floatie AU, it'll most likely make things easier.
> 
> The title is derived from an early version of Oranges & Lemons, Pennywise's musical motif.
> 
> TWs: blood and descriptions of family dysfunction.

As Andrea Uris spilled water onto her son’s back, she considered the divorce papers in her office. Her sister had suggested them on her most recent visit to Gloucester, and she’d hid them under her “out” tray for five days until rediscovering them and filing them away. She’d forgotten them after that, and only remembered them a month later while giving Stanley his bath.

His curly brown hair had darkened almost to black and straightened out limply over his slight forehead. His face looked to be around Andrea’s age as he gently organized the bubbles in the tub, flattening them into as straight a sheet as he could manage.

 _Don would poke fun if he weren’t working late,_ Andrea thought bitterly. _He’d come all up in arms about finances and he’d ask why Stan wouldn’t just leave them alone. Then Stan’d get upset, and then_ Don’d _get upset, and there’d come the waterworks..._

She kissed Stanley on the temple, pitying. He smiled indulgently.

Andrea liked their little moments together. Her son was polite, loyal, and quiet. He did well in daycare, said his “please”s and “thank you”s, and didn’t ask for a lot of toys. He didn’t deserve Don belittling him just because he had habits.

As she shampooed and conditioned Stan’s hair, she ruminated—lather, rinse, repeat; Stan, Don, the papers. Really, Don wasn’t _that_ bad, he just needed to be told that his words hurt Stan. Barring that, he could just do what all parents had to do with their children—get used to them. Besides, Stan was so young, and she didn’t know anything about custody rulings. Filling out the papers might do him more harm than good.

But she didn’t have to think about that now. Things hadn’t come to that yet. No sense worrying herself and jumping the gun.

“I’m going to go make a call to Mrs. Aurlette,” she announced. Stan looked up from his half-finished work, unperturbed. “I’ll be just down the hall. Are you going to be okay in here for a few minutes?”

Stan glanced down at his bubble sheet, clearly hesitant to bust it up by moving. “Yeah,” he said. Andrea patted his back mildly and stood up to go.

As she crossed the threshold from the bathroom into the hall, she set her foot into a particular place, freeing up the door from the thick brown carpet. Andrea sidestepped awkwardly away, allowing the door to slue sleekly away from her and stop-- _creeeeeeak--_ a few inches from closing on Stanley.

She stared at it. Goosebumps hackled on her biceps and shoulder blades like bat’s wings.

“Mom?” Stan’s voice, already croaky from disuse at the tender age of seven, called. Andrea looked past the door and into the yellow ruler of bathroom still visible. Stan’s head and left shoulder floated in the middle of it, looking for her.

 _Get a grip, Andrea! It’s a godforsaken_ door!

Embarrassed, she shook off the goosebumps and walked off.

Relief poked her in the back, as if she wasn’t supposed to give him a bath anyway, and she shook that off, too, bewildered.

The call to Mrs. Aurlette took longer than she’d expected as they discussed arrangements for Purim, and Andrea momentarily forgot Stan, Don, the divorce papers, Stan’s bubble sheet, and the door. She laughed to herself when Charlotte had to pull the phone away from her ear and shout at one of her teenagers, Marie, who decided right then to raise a din in the kitchen. Andrea recalled that Marie had been in a cooking phase as of late, and she was probably bickering with Charlotte about who was making dinner tonight.

She set the phone back in its cradle, feeling amicable and productive. She was Andrea Uris-- a pretty, reasonable, competent woman with a promising career, a beautiful son, and her whole life ahead of her. Her community didn’t just need her, they loved her, Don or not. She held her head high and preened over this as she headed back to the hall bathroom.

“Stan?” She called, knocking on the door. Stan was a prim child, and he insisted that knocking and waiting for a response was a common courtesy, one that extended to six-year-olds. Don couldn’t stand it—he insisted that signs of respect were expressly for people that were old enough to earn it-- which was partly why Andrea made a point to do it.

A slop of empty water against ceramic answered her, unaccompanied by the shuffling of scraggly six-year-old limbs. Stan said nothing.

“Stanley?” She repeated, a little louder this time. For a beat, she wondered if her little boy was playing games with her, and she’d find him hiding in the bathwater with his hands over his nose. But Stan playing games was unheard of; hide-and-seek was no exception. “We gotta wash you up, sweetie.”

Water plinked timidly behind the door, and then the bathroom was still as a tomb.

Again, a peculiar sensation petered around Andrea, grasping for her attention. But this time, it was more threatening instead of

_(you’d better not go back in there, Andrea)_

relieving, like she was watching a snake eat a mouse instead of waiting for her six-year-old to answer her.

And again, she caught herself, shoving down the fear irritably. Stan was just being silly and it was getting to her.

The first thing she noticed when she opened the door was the smell; an unspecific, loamy sort of smell that seemed to have been there for hours. The second was that Stan was not in the bathtub.

Andrea stepped closer, making _absolutely sure_ Stanley hadn’t miraculously grown a sense of humor. Gradually, the thin rectangle of bathtub showed itself beyond the lip of the tub, absent of Andrea’s son.

The smooth top of his bubble sheet had eroded off, and the bottom of it had gone an unsightly, speckled brown. The fringe of the bubbles, once clearly defined against Stan’s belly, had broken off into the space where Stan had been sitting. Under the small bits of froth was a broken semicircle of red.

Blood.

Oh.

A whimper escaped Andrea and she felt her body go all

_(floaty)_

all over. Trembling knees and ankles carried her to the tub and knelt her down, very, very carefully. Blood rolled around in the fat crescent like pollution clouds, silent and sure and poisonous.

She inhaled a deep breath of the metallic, lyey stink, and when it reached her, she screamed.

“STA--!”

Her eyes bulged, her hands went pale and clutched the rim of the tub. But Andrea could do nothing. She faintly registered the patter of little steps coming out to her but she couldn’t make sense of them, couldn’t think at all.

“Mom?”

Her head didn’t turn so much as shake on its knobby axis, towards the door, where Stanley was standing in wait.

His hair was mussed and still dark with water, but thickets of strands had popped up and curled back into place. He was in dry clothes. There wasn’t a drop of blood on him at all.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Oh.

Andrea quavered a little bit as she got up, ankles and joints rickety in her work pantyhose. She stared back at her son, eyes wide and imploring. “How long have you been out of the bath, Stanny?” she asked. Her son blinked.

Oh God, please don’t let there have been anything sharp in the bathtub. Maybe Don was replacing his razors and one of them fall in the bath and she just didn’t see, or maybe he had gotten hold of the scissors after getting out and he had gotten a cut, or something. And he just, he just didn’t want to call for her in case she was callous with him, like Don could be if Stan called him away from his work.

Or maybe it wasn’t blood at all. Maybe it was just food coloring, really bad-smelling food coloring that’d gone bad, perhaps (could food coloring _go_ bad?) Richie, Stan’s school friend from the Methodist church, would have put him up to that. His young mind was a veritable confectionary of all things foreign to Stan. There was a _lot_ of blood in the bathtub, please let it be a prank, please, please—

“I’ve been out for an hour now,” Stan said.

And, not receiving any further response, he went back the way he came.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm hoping to do Bev, Mike or Eddie's next, hoooopefully within the next week or two. Until then, ta! Hope you enjoyed. c:


End file.
